The emergence of an online listing system (e.g., such as eBAY®, Amazon®, and Rent.com® in which goods/services are offered to interested parties) has created new opportunities for a service provider to monetize transactions made between a user (e.g., a renter, a buyer, a prospective buyer, a mortgagor, etc.) and a lister (e.g., a landlord, a seller, a rental manager, a mortgagee, etc.) connected through the online listing system. It is important for the service provider to first identify when a transaction has been made between the user and the lister.
Numerous techniques exist for the service provider (e.g., an operator of the online listing system) to discover the transaction between the user and the lister when the user and the lister communicate via the Internet (e.g., through email, instant messenger, etc.). For example, the service provider can discover the transaction by monitoring and/or reading emails between the user and the lister when they communicate with each other through emails sent to each other through the online listing system. Once the transaction is discovered, the service provider can charge the user and/or the lister with a transaction fee (e.g., such as a fee when a particular property has been rented through a website such as Rent.com®).
In many scenarios, the user and the lister transact over the telephone (e.g., through telephone calls between the user to/from the lister). In these scenarios, the service provider must rely on manual methods to discover the transaction, as numerous technical challenges exist in the circuit switched telephone network to verify when and from whom a call has been made (e.g., the user and/or the lister may have caller ID blocking, the user may use multiple phones to call the lister, reconciling and integrating to an online database from data collected through a circuit switched network is inefficient/delayed, etc.). In one approach, the service provider may manually discover the transaction by calling the user and/or the seller and soliciting information about the nature of their relationship and/or whether they entered into the transaction (e.g., by offering monetary and/or non-monetary incentives to the user/lister to report transactions).
The service provider may have to hire expensive and trained staff to call the user and/or the lister and manually and ask them about whether a successful transaction was made (e.g., did the sale go through, how long was the response time, etc.). In addition, sometimes the user and/or the lister may resist paying the transaction fee without accurate justification from the service provider that the transaction was made possible through the online listing system (e.g., the user and/or the lister may want proof that they were first introduced to each other through the online listing system). The trained staff of the service provider may not be able to contact the user and/or the lister (e.g., via telephone/email) because their phone numbers and/or email addresses may have changed and/or the parties may be uncooperative (e.g., agreements between the user and the lister to sidestep a rebate payment to the service provider). As such, these manual methods are labor-intensive, expensive, difficult to justify, inaccurate, and incomplete.